ROME — Can fashion legitimately be displayed in an art museum?
Absolutely, according to Maria Grazia Chiuri, Fendi‘s chief creative officer, who decided to reproduce a 1985 exhibition conceived by Karl Lagerfeld with the Fendi sisters — Anna, Carla, Paola Franca, and Alda, daughters of founders Adele and Edoardo Fendi. A preview of the exhibition, titled “After Un Percorso di Lavoro. Fendi/Karl Lagerfeld 1985. After Steps Through Work,” was given on Thursday at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea /GNAMC in Rome, concurrently with the unveiling of Chiuri’s first couture collection for Fendi.
“This gives me great happiness because it was fundamental, crucial to me to show here and to hold this exhibition,” said Chiuri. “Back in 1985, it was scandalous to recognize that fashion has value in the cultural system, and the exhibition was very controversial. In this sense, Italy was a step behind compared, for example, with London and the Victoria and Albert Museum.”
The designer recalled seeing the exhibition in 1985, which only lasted a month, but acknowledged that later “it was kind of forgotten, with hardly and trace or testimony of it. It was such a different historical moment.”
She praised the Fendi sisters for being ahead of their time, and trusting and admiring Lagerfeld, and that first exhibition celebrated the first two decades of their collaboration, which would continue until the designer’s death in 2019.
The word “After” was added before the original title, which telegraphs the idea of “creating something new today after the original exhibition and something else that, perhaps, can still be further created,” said curator Maria Luisa Frisa during a walk-through.
The exhibition “After Un Percorso di Lavoro. Fendi/Karl Lagerfeld 1985
After Steps Through Work” in Rome.
Giorgio Benni
“Karl wanted visitors to participate in the various steps that lead from conception to design and production in fur, paying tribute to the work of the team, its artisans and seamstresses,” said Frisa. “Through a narrative sequence defined by the designer, the exhibition highlighted the experimentation that radically transformed the furs with unique and revolutionary results, deconstructing them, stripping them of linings, achieving lightness, adding colors and mixing different hides. Paola Fendi told me that Karl tested the sisters with the most outlandish requests and the answer would always be ‘let’s try’.”
Frisa said that Chiuri’s decision to replicate the exhibition allows “to generate a broader, new, and unpredictable relationship with the public.” As an example, she cited artist Sherrie Levine and the concept of appropriation art, and how it is “recontextualized as the perspective changes. It’s not dissimilar to re-reading a book, with different impressions depending on the moment, or finding new terms or ideas you missed the first time.”
Frisa underscored how “reactivating a past exhibition is a critical operation.” The exhibition in 1985 was held in the same museum but in different spaces, and regarding the pieces on display, not all were recoverable. “As much as possible, an attempt was made to reproduce the structure of the original exhibition, while missing objects, such as canvases and furs, were replaced by heritage reproductions,” said Frisa.
Striking is a reproduction of a metallic structure with moving and rotating mechanical parts that reflected Lagerfeld’s Bauhaus influences, with 18 fur coats on display that seem to float and dance.
There is no doubt that a series of sketches by Lagerfeld, with his incredibly detailed comments, down to the stitches and the buttons to be employed, are definitely art works.
A sketch by Karl Lagerfeld on display.
Giorgio Benni
“I understand the considerations today over the use of fur, but you can’t be ahistorical,” said Frisa, asked to comment on the current scenario. “When you approach the history of Fendi, you can’t not start from its fur DNA. I wanted to recover its history, its craft, the heritage that is unique in the world and that made Italian fashion great around the world.”
A new section of the exhibition is dedicated to the expansive press reviews generated by the exhibition in 1985, on the opportunity of bringing fashion into an art museum, “which becomes an occasion to reflect on the unresolved problems of fashion museology in Italy,” said Frisa.
Also surprising are the storyboards that capture the force of Lagerfeld’s imagination and determination to remain modern, foreseeing scenarios, new technologies, and experiments on digital and video that are now a reality.
The exhibited objects and documents come from the Fendi archive and the GNAMC historical archive and include 22 paper models, seven preparatory canvases, 50 sample boards, 180 sketches, 25 furs, and the movie “Historie D’Eau” directed by Jacques de Bascher in 1977. There are also three interviews with Paola Fendi, Ida Panicelli, who curated the 1985 exhibition, and art historian Arturo Carlo Quintavalle.
The exhibition runs from Friday to Oct. 25.
